Reel life crime: From the crime scene to the big screen

AMERICAN Hustle and The Wolf Of Wall Street suggest that true crime films have never been more popular. The Daily Star Sunday's film critic Andy Lea takes a look at some of the real stories behind cinema's most famous hoodlums.

DONNIE BRASCO

AL PACINO may be guilty of the odd bit of over-acting but you’d never expect to hear one of his performances rubbished in court.

But that’s what happened at the 2005 trial of Joseph “Big Joey” Massino, suspected head of New York’s Bonanno crime family.

In Donnie Brasco, Pacino plays Benjamin “Lefty” Ruggiero – a crook who welcomed undercover FBI agent Joe Pistone (played by Johnny Depp) into the mafia clan in the late 1970s.

Pistone spent six years gathering evidence on the Bonnano family by posing as jewel thief Brasco.

When his identity is revealed in the film we see Lefty remove his jewellery before reporting his own killing.

But in the trial we learned that did not happen.

Lefty was actually picked up by police before the mafia could get to him.

It was his side-kick, Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano, played by Michael Madsen, who was murdered for introducing Pistone to the mob.

It was Sonny who was rumoured to have removed his jewellery before the mafia came for him. And it was Massino himself who ordered the killing.

“I went on a ‘walk-talk’ with Joe Massino in Howard Beach,” Bonanno underboss-turned-informant Salvatore “Good-looking Sal” Vitale told the court.

He added: “He said ‘I have to give him a receipt for the Donnie Brasco situation’. I understood that to mean he wanted him dead.”

Mr Vitale said Massino waited in a van outside the Staten Island house where the murder took place, ready to shoot Sonny Black if he escaped.

His body was found a year later, minus its hands, in a local swamp.

British director Mike Newell implied that Lefty was the victim of the hit to make his ending more powerful.

After all, the film had spent two hours exploring the growing friendship between the low-level mafia man and the FBI agent.

But most of the rest of the film is close to real life.

Pistone says the movie, based on his memoir, is “95% accurate”.

Newell hired him as a consultant and made sure he was around on set to keep things real.

“He was very concerned that he capture me and do my character justice,” said Pistone.

But the agent, who retired from undercover work in 1981, got involved long before the cameras rolled.

Pistone said of working with Johnny Depp: “They started shooting the movie in January that year and I hung out with him from November.

“The first time I saw the movie it was definitely surreal seeing myself portrayed on screen but he had me to a T.”

An FBI agent since 1969, Pistone infiltrated a New York truck hijacking squad and was then asked to undertake a six-month operation to penetrate the gangs who handled the goods they stole.

No one, not even Pistone, thought Operation Sun Apple would last for six years or reach so far into the heart of the New York mafia.

Pistone was married with three children and his increasingly infrequent visits home put his family life under enormous pressure.

He took the name Donnie Brasco and invented a back story for himself as a non-violent jewel thief so he could avoid being ordered to hurt people.

“If you say you’re a collection guy for loans you’re expected to smack people around,” he said.

In the film, Pistone has an uncanny ability to befriend mafia men. But he insists that, unlike in the film, he never lost sight of his job.

“You never let your guard down,” he said.

“I considered them acquaintances who I worked with. But you’ve got to keep in your mind that the guy who is closest to you is probably the guy who’s going to kill you.

“All wiseguys know that but it was especially true for me being undercover.”

STARS: The cast of hit film Donnie Brasco back in 1997 [REX]

WHAT'S GREAT ABOUT THE FILM?

In mob circles, the film has a reputation as one of the most accurate mafia films ever made.

But it was the performances of Depp and Pacino which impressed the critics.

At the time, Depp was known for quirky romantic roles in films like Edward Scissorhands and Benny and Joon.

Total Film magazine even talked about “a star-making performance from Johnny Depp, who finally seems to have given up playing too-good-to-be-true eccentrics.”

BEST SCENE

DONNIE goes to a Japanese restaurant with microphones hidden in his shoes, unaware that all footwear has to removed at the door.

BEST LINE: DONNIE explains mob slang – “‘Forget about it’ is like if you agree with someone, you know, like Raquel Welch is one great piece of ass, forget about it. But then, if you disagree, like a Lincoln is better than a Cadillac? Forget about it! But then, it’s also like if something’s the greatest thing in the world, like mingia, those peppers, forget about it! But it’s also like saying ‘Go to hell’ too. Like, you know, like “Hey Paulie, you got a one inch pecker?” and Paulie says “Forget about it!” Sometimes it just means forget about it.”

FIVE FACTS

• AT first Tom Cruise was lined up to play the lead role. But the project was postponed after the 1990 release of Goodfellas. Producers thought it was too soon for another fact-based mafia movie.

• IT was Brit director Mike newell’s first Hollywood movie. He was better known then as the man behind Four Weddings And A Funeral.

• PISTONE and Newell, clashed with Pacino over the scruffy hat he wore to play Lefty. Pacino thought it helped him get into character. But Pistone knew Lefty was a snappy dresser.

• A BOUNTY of $500,000 was placed on Pistone’s head. He lives under an assumed name.

• NEWELL went to Brooklyn social clubs to meet real mobsters. In one club he saw a jukebox with nothing but Sinatra records. A hand-written sign below the payphone warned that the phone was bugged.

These are three victims of the killer who called himself "Zodiac" and braged to police by letter of his deeds [AP]

ZODIAC

RELEASED: 2007, DIRECTOR: DAVID FINCHER

ACADEMY AWARDS: NONE

KATHLEEN Johns was getting worried. Perhaps she shouldn’t have taken the strange man up on his offer to drive her to a garage.

But he seemed so helpful when he stopped to help with her flat tyre. And when her wheel suddenly came away when she tried to drive off, she didn’t think she had a choice.

After all, it was dark and she was alone with her baby.

But now they had passed several garages and her baby was getting hungry.

nervously, she summoned up the courage to break the silence. “Do you always help people like this?” she asked.

The stranger smiled.

“By the time I get through with them, they won’t need my help,” he replied.

Kathleen didn’t bother with any more questions. When the car stopped at the next junction, she bolted across the road with her baby and hid.

The man, who she would later recognise as the Zodiac killer, eventually drove away.

Others weren’t so lucky.

Zodiac struck repeatedly across San Francisco’s Bay Area in 1968 and 1969. The killer himself claimed to have attacked 37 times but police counted seven victims, two of whom survived.

America has suffered many prolific serial killers but none has been the centre of such mystery because Zodiac has never been caught.

After repeatedly taunting police and media, he simply disappeared.

nHis elaborate ciphered messages (most of which have never been decoded), his terrifying hooded disguise and his use of mystical signs have made him the model for countless horror movie villains.

In 1971, Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry used his .44 Magnum to blast a serial killer called Scorpio to death.

Earlier in the film, Scorpio had hijacked a school bus packed with kids, a clear echo of one of the threats Zodiac made.

“School children make nice targets,” he wrote in October 1969 in a letter to a newspaper. “I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning.

“Just shoot out the front tyre and then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.”

Film director David Fincher grew up in the Bay area during the time of the attacks and can remember seeing the police escort his bus to school.

So when he made his 2007 movie about the killings he knew the facts were dramatic enough.

Kathleen Johns’ close encounter is one of the real-life events chillingly recreated in his flick.

Screenwriter James Vanderbilt and producer Brad Fischer used a book by San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist-turned- author Robert Graysmith as source material.

At first Graysmith (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) isn’t taken seriously by his editor.

But when he manages to crack one of the coded letters and makes a couple of correct guesses about the killer’s actions, eccentric crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr) agrees to team up with him.

Graysmith ends up spending more time on the case than either Avery or any of the investigating officers.

As a result his wife Melanie (Chloe Sevigny) leaves him, taking their children with her.

It took the real Graysmith ten years to write the Zodiac book and it did cost him his marriage.

At the end of the film, Graysmith comes face to face with his prime suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, inside a hardware store where he works.

This actually happened, although not quite in the same way as Fincher staged it.

Allen died in 1992 but the Zodiac mystery lives on.

Police continue to get at least one Zodiac tip-off a week.

WHAT'S GOOD ABOUT IT?

The film has been praised for its cinematography, its script, the acting and its authenticity.

Late US film critic Roger Ebert described the film as “The All The President’s Men of serial killer movies”.

But it is the way Fincher stages the murders that really stays with you.

The opening attack on a couple in a dark car park shows the director wasn’t afraid to use horror movie staples like fake shocks to build suspense.

BEST LINE: Avery to Graysmith: “Do you know more people die in the East Bay commute every three months than that idiot ever killed?

“He offed a few citizens, wrote a few letters, then faded into a footnote... not that I haven’t been sitting here idly, waiting for you to drop by and reinvigorate my sense of purpose.

AMERICAN HUSTLE

A HUGE yacht cruised in the blistering sun off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

On board a group of men raised a toast to their amiable host, an Arab sheikh called Kambir Abdul Rahman.

One of the men, Angelo Errichetti, the mayor of Camden, New Jersey, felt like he had 25,000 reasons to clink his glass with his business partners.

That was the number of dollars a court would later hear he’d accepted as a bribe to ease the sheikh into a casino deal in Atlantic City.

But what he didn’t realise was the yacht did not really belong to a sheikh. After being seized in a drugs bust, it had been acquired by the FBI.

And before setting sail on that balmy afternoon in 1979, their technicians had fitted it with an array of hidden cameras.

The man who had gone under the name of Kambir Abdul Rahman was not a sheikh at all. He was one of two FBI agents who had been posing as a wealthy Arab.

The sting was part of a daring operation known as Abscam and, by the time it was finished, Errichetti, along with six members of Congress and one senator, would be convicted of bribery charges.

But the convictions weren’t the only thing that shocked the American public about the operation named Abdul Enterprises after the phony company used to lure the politicians. It was the remarkable CV of the man who had masterminded it.

Mel Weinberg had never been a policeman or an FBI agent. He was a cigar-smoking career conman from the Bronx who the FBI had hired to scam politicians.

In Oscar-nominated crime caper American Hustle, Brit star Christian Bale plays a character inspired by Weinberg called Irving Rosenfeld.

Bale spent three days with Weinberg researching the role, while director David O Russell used the book The Sting Man, which is about Weinberg, as source material.

Weinberg says of Bale: “He invited me to his house but I curse a lot, so I had to be careful around his wife. He’s a helluva guy.”

Bale, 40, is clearly a lot younger than Weinberg, who was 55 when he took part in Abscam.

Director David O Russell is very upfront about embellishing the truth – an opening title reads: “Some of this actually happened.”

But surprisingly, a lot of it did happen.

Like Rosenfeld, Weinberg, now 89, turned to crime while growing up in the Bronx.

It was there that he began stealing gold stars from his teacher’s desk to show his mum what a great student he was.

And when his father’s window glass business got in trouble Weinberg, like his fictional counterpart, drove around town shooting out windows with a slingshot.

His dad’s business surged and Weinberg moved on to more elaborate schemes.

One which didn’t make the movie was a bizarre scam involving jackets and socks.

Weinberg would target commuters who were clearly in a rush to get to work and sell them just the ankle portions of socks and the front sections of expensive-looking jackets.

But he would soon discover that desperate businessmen were even softer targets than busy commuters.

He set up a fake investment business that charged an advance fee for securing a loan from a non-existent London bank.

To give the scam a touch of class, Weinberg drafted in his Watford-born mistress Evelyn Knight to meet and greet potential clients.

In the film Amy Adams plays Sydney Prosser, a character inspired by Evelyn who adopts a corny upper crust accent to pose as Lady Edith Greensly.

Weinberg made £2million in ten years before being scammed himself by undercover FBI agents.

They offered him a deal: agree to work with them on four cases and he’d escape jail.

This is how Abscam was born. And it’s here that the fiction begins to part company with the facts.

Weinberg did work for the FBI but his mistress Evelyn didn’t. And by the time he targeted the mayor of Camden, New Jersey (in the film he’s called Carmine Polito and is played by Jeremy Renner), Weinberg was actually on the FBI payroll.

To the outrage of many US newspapers the sting earned him $150,000 of tax-payers’ money.

Weinberg did develop a friendship with Errichetti but only in the film did he try to secure him immunity from prosecution.

Bradley Cooper’s character Richie DiMaso is an amalgamation of several FBI agents but he most closely resembles Anthony Amoroso Jr.

As part of his cover, Amoroso lived in expensive hotels and drove a range of flash cars. The total cost of Abscam was $600,000 – a small fortune in 1979.

The film takes the most liberties with the character of the conman’s wife Rosalyn, played by Jennifer Lawrence. No one ever suggested that Marie Weinberg was sleeping with a mobster or kept accidentally setting fire to their home.

Indy Badhwar, a reporter who worked on the Abscam case, describes her as a “kind, generous and friendly woman” who left behind a suicide note blaming her husband before hanging herself in 1982.

What’s good about the film? It’s very, very funny. The script is packed with zingy one- liners and the make-up department went to town by donning everyone in garish 1970s outfits and hilariously out-of-date hairdos.

But it’s greatest strength is the acting. Everyone here is on top of their game, especially Jennifer Lawrence, who steals every scene as livewire Rosalyn.

EVIL IS IN THE DETAIL

• IT'S only the second film in more than 30 years to have nominees in all four Oscar acting categories. The other example is David O Russell’s last film, Silver Linings Playbook.

• BALE gained more than 40lb to play Rosenfeld. He slouched so much he had two herniated discs and changed his appearance so much that De Niro didn’t recognise him on set.

• THE script was originally titled american Bulls*** and came in eighth place on Hollywood’s 2010 Black List which ranks unproduced screenplays.

• A LINE dance sequence at Camden City Hall featuring Irving, Richie, Carmine and Rosalyn was cut from the final film. Glimpses of the scene appear in the film’s trailers.

• JENNIFER Lawrence perfected her accent by watching old episodes of reality show the Real Housewives Of New Jersey, below.

CLASSIC: Bonnie and Clyde is one of the great American films [WARNER BROS.]

BONNIE AND CLYDE

RELEASED: 1967, DIRECTOR: ARTHUR PENN

ACADEMY AWARDS: BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS AND BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Bonnie and Clyde, Warren Beatty’s revolutionary crime movie, became a worldwide hit against the odds.

“Who wants to see the rise and fall of a couple of rats?” asked studio boss Jack Warner in a 1967 memo.

“Am sorry I did not see the script before they were to begin production before I said yes...This era went out with Cagney.”

The 74-year-old head of Warner Brothers only gave the film a limited initial American release and was so convinced it would flop he had happily signed over a 40% share of the profits to producer and star Beatty.

Warner didn’t realise the outlook of movie-goers was changing.

In the screen version of the bank robbers’ tale, Bonnie and Clyde weren’t “rats” at all – they were portrayed as a glamorous, rebellious young couple that 1960s audiences had been desperate to see on the big screen.

Unlike a James Cagney film, this was a movie where the outlaws were the heroes while the villains were the parents who had betrayed them and the forces of law and order who wanted to keep them down.

It was a new kind of crime movie that struck a chord with a young generation.

After becoming a smash hit on its UK release, the film was put back into American cinemas where, to Beatty’s delight, it went on to amass more than $70million dollars from its meagre $2.5million budget.

But most shocking at the time was the movie’s blood-spattered, slow-motion finale.

Arthur Penn was one of the first directors to make extensive use of squibs – explosive charges in bags of stage blood that can be detonated inside actors’ clothes.

In an era in which movie violence was sanitised and mainly bloodless, Bonnie and Clyde’s deaths came like a bolt from the blue.

Hollywood would never be the same again.

But while the film was definitely historic, it was far from historically accurate.

Robert Benton, one of the film’s writers, had heard stories of the legendary bank robbing duo while growing up in east Texas.

But he and his partner David Newman were more inspired by Jules et Jim, the ground-breaking romance by French director Francois Truffaut, than actual history, when they wrote their first draft.

Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were two members of a much larger gang that included Clyde’s older brother Melvin, known as Buck, and his wife Blanche.

Between 1931 and 1934, the Barrow gang robbed their way around 11 US states, a crime spree that left at least 13 people, including seven police officers, dead.

They escaped the cops using fast cars to exploit a legal loophole that allowed them to commit a crime in one state and cross into another without being pursued.

But the gang came to a grisly end when Bonnie and Clyde, inset, were ambushed and killed in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, in 1934. Clyde was 25 and Bonnie 23.

Even in their own life- times, their lives were at odds with the version played out in newsreels, newspapers and pulp novels.

The image of Bonnie Parker grew out of a playful photograph of her clutching a machine gun and smoking a cigar that cops found at one of their hideouts.

But in reality, it seems unlikely that Bonnie ever fired a shot.

There’s little doubt Bonnie did run with the gang for two years after falling in love with hardened criminal Clyde.

But according to Dr Beatrice Colin, author of The True Story of Bonnie Parker, none of the gang or any police officer ever witnessed her firing a gun.

FACTS:

• BEFORE deciding to play Clyde Barrow himself, producer Warren Beatty wanted to cast Bob Dylan in the role.

The folk singer was 25 at the time, the same age as Barrow was when he met his end.

• IN the original script, Clyde was bisexual and was in love with Bonnie and his male getaway driver. Beatty and Penn persuaded the writers to make him heterosexual, if impotent.

• THE real Blanche Barrow disapproved of the way Estelle Parson played her on screen, complaining: “That film made me look like a screaming horse’s ass!”

• BONNIE Parker was just 4ft 10in – nine inches shorter than Faye Dunaway. Cher auditioned for the role of Bonnie.